Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University and research collaborator on the Harmony Project has spent her life surrounded by music. And, today, she is studying how musical training can harness the brain’s natural plasticity, or adaptiveness, to help students become better overall students and readers, even when they grow up in impoverished environments.
“Music and language skills rely upon auditory processing. Although reading may not be thought of as a primarily auditory activity, its foundation rests on a child making sense of incoming auditory input in order to map speech sounds correctly on to orthographic representations,” says Kraus. “Many of the same aspects of sound processing that are deficient in children with language and learning impairments have been found to be strengthened in those who receive music training, and music-based interventions have demonstrated some success in the remediation of reading problems, too.”
Excerpt from article by Kayt Skukel. Read more at http://magazine.good.is/articles/music-literacy-brain